Hanging Out With Kafka

By Jennifer Schuessler

Published: April 3, 2005

AFTER the German writer W. G. Sebald's book ''The Emigrants'' appeared in English in 1996, its previously obscure author was hailed as a writer whose work belonged on the high shelf alongside that of Kafka, Borges and Proust. A collection of portraits of four Central Europeans living in England and the United States, ''The Emigrants'' was a mesmerizing but hard-to-classify combination of biography, fiction, memoir, travel sketch and antiquarian essay, accompanied by grainy black-and-white photographs of uncertain origin and often mysterious relationship to the text. Sebald's themes, which deepened in the equally idiosyncratic and haunting books that were translated in the years to come, were nothing less than the persistence and fragility of memory and the terrifyingly random nature of history, as exemplified by its darkest 20th-century chapters. When Sebald -- who spent most of his adult life teaching in British universities -- was killed in a car accident in December 2001 at the age of 57, just after his novel ''Austerlitz'' appeared in English, the ghastly event cut short a late-blooming career that seemed to be building toward an unusual greatness.

Still, the books have kept coming. ''Campo Santo,'' Anthea Bell's translation of 16 literary and critical essays published in newspapers and journals between 1975 and 2003, is just the latest Sebald work to appear since his death. But unlike such offerings as ''After Nature'' and ''On the Natural History of Destruction,'' it is very much a miscellany, and an often frustrating one. The early essays, on Peter Handke, G?r Grass and others, are written in a dense academic style and will be rough going for those who haven't kept up with the authors in question. By the mid-1990's, however, the familiar Sebald approach emerges. In these later essays, he doesn't so much analyze his subjects -- Kafka, Nabokov, Bruce Chatwin -- as accompany them, turning them into Sebald characters: melancholy men living in a real or metaphorical exile, haunted by the past and the inevitability of their own dissolution.

But the core of the book is the four pieces on Corsica gathered at the beginning. (One of them -- a meditation on Corsican funerary practices -- gives the collection its title.) In an introductory note, the book's editor, Sven Meyer, identifies these short fragments, ranging from 2 to 19 pages, as ''the last and unfinished work of a writer's life that came to a premature end.'' Yet it's unclear if Sebald had any intention of returning to this project, which he put aside in the mid-1990's to begin work on ''Austerlitz.'' And read on the heels of that masterpiece, the Corsican material seems less a full-scale work waiting to be realized than a ghostly afterimage. The darkly companionable voice is there, along with the eerily charged descriptions of landscapes, catalogs of paintings and relics, lists of plants, wry accountings of strange historical theories (that, for example, Napoleon's march across Europe was caused by the colorblindness that made him unable to distinguish red blood from green grass) and offhand references to ''the unfathomable misfortune of life.'' But what holds Sebald's completed works together -- the larger web of coincidence and correspondence that suggests the universe is both interconnected and frighteningly formless -- is missing.

Sebald's books have most often unfolded in northern Europe, where the lugubrious climate seems to reflect his characters' inner weather. But despite all their island's sunshine, he feels a kinship with the Corsicans, with what he sees as their fealty to a bygone emperor and their simultaneous terror of and reverence for the dead, who are believed to wander the countryside in regiments, recognizable by their shrunken frames and blurry faces, their ''strange piping voices.'' In one eerie passage, Sebald wonders if he has met a similar emigrant from the other side in a supermarket checkout line in England, but concludes, with a beautifully understated Sebaldian flourish, that an increasingly crowded world has no more room -- or patience -- for such ghostly visitors: ''Leaving a present without memory, in the face of a future that no individual mind can now envisage, in the end we shall ourselves relinquish life without feeling any need to linger at least for a while, nor shall we be impelled to pay return visits from time to time.'' This magnificent writer may have left abruptly, but his own shadow lingers.